Amazing
When Obama was nominated as the Democratic candidate more than a year ago, conservative bloggers started there and then to unload Bush’s economic mess on Obama. After the fact, more conservatives reached back to Obama’s nomination to claim that everything after that date was his fault.
When Obama won the presidency–more than two months before he could take office and actually do anything–most of the right wing immediately termed the economy the “Obama Recession.”
Shortly after Obama took office, when the stock market continued the fall that had started under Bush, conservatives blamed it all on Obama.
So I think it’s pretty firmly established: according to conservatives, Bush no longer controlled the economy. Everything was going down the tubes, so it must be all, completely, 200% Obama’s fault. he owns this economy, irrevocably, irreversibly.
Obama passed his stimulus law back in February. Almost instantly, things started turning around. Job losses decreased dramatically. Within a few weeks, the stock market plummet halted and reversed itself. People started to see signs of recover. And today, the Dow hit 10,000.
So naturally, Fox News has now branded this “The Bush Recovery.”
Wow. Even for conservatives, that is fantastically hypocritical. And that is saying a lot.
As I recall, the economy went into a recession almost the moment Bush became president. And for six months he blamed the recession on Clinton.
You will notice that they don’t bring that up anymore because that would mean that Bush owns all the job losses that occurred in January, February, March, and April and so on. Those job losses are so mammoth and the job gains during the ‘good years’ of his presidency so puny, he would have an overall way negative net job creation under his presidency. As it is, he gets a break, because of where the lines are drown, most of the massive job losses that Bush caused he will not get credit for. So for historical purposes, boy blunder makes out good again, and the record will show that maybe he created about a million jobs on his watch. All those net jobs created will have been in the public sector. There was no private sector job gains during the Bush presidency.
Now a million is a big number. But as Rodney Dangerfield says, “if you want to look thin, stand next to someone fatter than you.”
And who does Bush get to stand next to? The all time jobs creation champion, Bill Clinton. Over 20 million jobs were created under Clinton’s watch. Now my Republican friends will say that he benefited from the computer boom, or whatever. At the very least, I can reply that he didn’t screw up a good thing. Not only that. There were massive financial meltdowns in Latin America, The Pacific Rim, and Russia, and the United States economy never felt a thing and just kept on creating jobs.
I think this gets to the real reason why Republicans are manic and maniacal in trying to undermine the Obama presidency. Deep down inside, even they know there policies are antithetical to economic growth and the public interests. (Though that’s never been a problem for them).
What they are worried about is, if Obama’s presidency is a success, on the order of Clintons, Democrats will be able to point at the crater of the Bush presidency for decades, and I mean on the order of half a century, and ask the public if that’s really what they want?
So it’s not just that the Bush era is incredibly thin in jobs creation and over all prosperity, it’s also the fact that he’s standing next to an enormously fat jobs creating Clinton era. Repugs want to say that’s a fluke. If Obama turns out to be incredibly fat at jobs creation than their whole entire movement has no future for the rest of theirs (and ours) life times, outside of being the ‘loyal opposition’.
So a lot of their politics now is obviously suicidal – but I think thats just short term suicide. They are impaling themselves short term in hopes that it will buy them a long term future. If Obama fails then the wingnut party has a chance to claw back in five or ten years. If Obama succeeds, then they are out of power for twenty, thirty, maybe forty years and perhaps for good.
As for Bush getting credit for the recovery, that’s absurd. It’s like he wantonly, recklessly drank poison, then at the last moment, before he passed out, he called 911. The doctors came and some how salvaged him – so he wants to get credit for calling the doctors, but never mind that suicide economic policy he implemented so that the rich could become richer at the expense of everyone else… for generations.
Also underlying the 1990s boom was offshoring manufacturing to China and Mexico. Having one guy manage the warehouse is lot more efficient than overseeing a factory floor.
The piper has yet to be paid with this particular productivity increase. We papered over it in 2002-2007 with the housing bubble (which dumped HUNDREDS of billions of hot money into the economy each year 2004-2007) but now we’re as screwed as Japan was in the early 1990s.
But yeah, FOX being FOX isn’t hypocritical, it’s comical.